


The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

by villainne



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Earth's Mightiest Trainwrecks, Gen, I hate myself, Misery, Nightmares, Post-Trauma, Sadness, hard drive purge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 19:22:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2281641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villainne/pseuds/villainne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're all haunted by something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a drabble that grew out of a deleted scene from the Killers verse. I'm just so fucking sad about the Avengers, it's stupid.
> 
> (Also Bruce's habit of reciting the periodic table to keep from turning is definitely borrowed from a Bruce/Natasha fic I read this summer but I don't know which one.)

**BRUCE**

Bruce had one bad dream that left him clutching the sheets and chanting the periodic table, and then he rigged up a heart monitor to an alarm clock, so if his heart rate rose in his sleep, he'd wake up before it got dangerous. He still has the dreams, though. 

In some of them he's chasing someone through dark hallways, desperate to crush something in his hands. Sometimes he sees Natasha, clutching her side, looking genuinely terrified the way she never does in battle. Sometimes he's falling. The alarm wakes him up before he finds his prey, before he hits the ground. Before he can reach Natasha. He knows these are memories, which is why they haunt him.

Since the accident he doesn’t dream about his childhood anymore. It’s always the present threat.

**STEVE**

Steve has nightmares where he watches people fall. 

From a distance, Tony's inert suit looked like a body, and up close it had looked like a coffin. In his dreams he sees Bucky's body falling out of the sky until it gets close enough to see the glint of metal in the sun. Sometimes that's when he wakes up, sometimes he watches the suit open and Bucky's face is there, sometimes it's Stark falling through the snow, sometimes he even sees the ground rushing towards him through the clouds. 

He wakes up gasping, cold, ice in his lungs.

**TONY**

Tony had plenty of bad dreams before New York ever happened, thank you very much. Tony had plenty of bad dreams before he was kidnapped by terrorists and tortured in a cave in the desert, actually. The funny thing about dreams is that the ones about being drowned, about heart surgery, about explosions, about aliens and nuclear missiles and falling into darkness aren’t quantitatively more frightening than the ones about his father, or wandering for hours through the empty halls of the mansion, or that one time he’d maybe gone a little too far and experienced a cocaine overdose. A terrifying fucking dream is a terrifying fucking dream.

Sometimes his dreams are about other people, now, which he tries to view positively, as a sign of emotional maturity. He dreams about Pepper glowing from the inside almost weekly.

**CLINT**

Clint has always been a pretty level-headed dude, I mean you kind of have to be when you’re an assassin. That’s the job. You can’t let things phase you. He reminds himself of that a lot. These days he doesn’t remember his dreams, much, but he remembers the color blue, pale like ice, and when he wakes up he always thinks for just a second that he’s been sleepwalking. He tries to memorize the motel ceiling before he fall asleep, so he’ll recognize his surroundings as soon as he wakes up.

**NATASHA**

There’s no amount of reckoning Natasha can do to make herself stop dreaming about the things she counts in her ledger. Fortunately she doesn’t need much sleep.

On nights when it’s bad she tallies both sides, like counting sheep, but she already knows both numbers by heart so it doesn’t help much. She dreams the black dreams in Russian, even if they didn’t happen that way. The red dreams are often wordless. Violence is a universal language.

**THOR**

Thor mostly dreams about his brother. The night mares are always about his brother, shrieking at him or falling from the Bifrost or lying defeated in his cell as the glamour drains away. He dreams about New Mexico, and Jane, and Dr. Selvig, and his own mother’s death sometimes, but it’s always about Loki, at the bottom. He wakes up heartbroken.


End file.
